The Present Perfect

Last week I got this postcard from a Little One traveling abroad with her family:

Dear Ms. Amy, I have been missing you…

I loved everything about this. And wow! what a great use of the present perfect progressive tense. I have been missing you…The missing of the piano teacher took place in the unspecified past and is ongoing. Of course it is. You never stop missing your piano teacher.

While one of the assumptions behind practice is that it is something you return to day after day, good mood or bad mood, inspired or not, every now and again a break in routine is a good thing. It gives us a chance to miss things: our cat, our piano teachers, our beds. It gets us out of our ruts, turns our perspective upside down, rattles our cages. “Why don’t I try….” we think, and suddenly a new idea is born.

Summers, in general, have a way of doing this too. The release from our relentless schedules frees up the part of our brains that otherwise settles deeply into the same old patterns. There is nothing like an empty summer afternoon to spark a bit of new thinking. In order to do something really creative, one has to be slightly bored. Sometimes in our mad world of busyness, we forget that simple truth.

I was reminded of this recently after our holiday in Hawaii. Sitting on the porch of our rental cottage on the Big Island, suddenly all sorts of new teaching ideas flooded into my restless and roaming thoughts. Or rather, it wasn’t so much an onslaught of new ideas as it was new combination of old ideas. Integration, I think, is always something to strive for whenever possible.

Remember Diatonic Chord Scales? Remember Grab Bag 5 and Reverse Grab Bag?

So do my kids, which is why this new combination has been rich with potential.

Every week my students have a composition/improvisation assignment. This can take a variety of forms: Grab Bag 5, for starters, of course. There are the compositions using seasonal themes: Halloween, Easter, Lunar New Year and so on. A suite of Summer compositions might include: Popsicles, 4th of July, Summer Solstice, Ice Cream, Baseball, Mosquitos, Sunflowers, Bees, Heat Wave. Sometimes students write compositions based on a story or fairy tale. Often we get ideas from a “composition bowl” in which the students have supplied the ideas (Three kids this week drew “Ms. Amy’s Cats.” I don’t know which kid thought of this title, but it is a very good one. I suggested that this might inspire a very annoying composition because the cats, this week in particular, have been very annoying.). There are at least ten thousand variations on composition assignments, maybe more.

Here’s another one. You will need a composition bowl of possible titles/themes and a bowl of note names (Poker chips work great. Label each one with a different note name: F-sharp, B-flat, C...).

Students draw a composition title and three chips. They now have a title to work with and three notes. The notes become the chords that must be used somewhere in the composition: one major, one minor, one diminished (Remember those pesky chord scales? This week one student identified the diminished chord in his scale as “Reduced.” Another kid called it “Depleted.” I also got “Dehydrated.” This made me laugh, but the sentiment is right on.). Students are not limited to only these three harmonies in their compositions, but all three must be included at some point.

So for example, those lucky kids, who this week are a composing piece called “Ms. Amy’s Cats,” might be including, let’s say, an F-sharp major chord, a B-flat minor chord and a C diminished chord somewhere within their composition. This combination has great potential to be very annoying, indeed.

This summer might be one big present perfect progressive tense. There are the cats, annoying in the unspecified past, but also in the present. Or maybe they just are really hot in these days of relentless 100+ degree temps, equally uncomfortable in the recent past and in the present. To survive, I have been existing on watermelon and ice cream, supplemented by the random cold beer or chilled Orvieto Classico. I have been swimming every single day at dawn. Our schedules are full this month: I have been seeing friends and former students, my nephew has been visiting this week. I have been working through 7-hour teaching days, and putting in long hours at the piano in preparation for some upcoming rehearsals and performances. I have been watering the garden every evening, triage watering I call it, in an attempt to keep the geraniums and herbs alive. Even the cacti and succulents have been looking withered and parched, depleted and reduced and dehydrated, much like diminished chord, now that I think about it. Which is exactly how I feel.

Because admittedly, sometimes I have been cranky about much of this, both in the unspecified past and in the present. The world is not getting cooler any time soon. There will always be too many demands on our time and good humor, and not enough hours in the day. We will always need to be creative with the compositional makeup of our lives: some major chords, some minor ones, and some days depleted, reduced, diminished harmonies are going to insert themselves into our routines. And so, as always, there are many things to practice, both today and in the future.

I have been practicing.